Take a tour of Martha Vineyard's ultimate dining destination and the Obamas' preferred date spot on the island along with Beach Plum head chef, Chris Fischer

Take a tour of Martha Vineyard's ultimate dining destination — and the Obamas' preferred date spot on the island — along with Beach Plum head chef, Chris Fischer

1 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Man: Chris Fischer

"It is the attendance at a great meal," wrote food critic John Mariani, "with one too many courses and two too many glasses of wine, that makes civilization spin, romance bloom, and friendship last." For Beach Plum Restaurant head chef Chris Fischer, this meal was at Mario Batali's Babbo in 2004. He'd had an appreciation of food throughout his life, influenced in large part by his father, Albert Fischer III, who insisted the family sit for dinner together each night when Chris was young. His interest lead him to the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco (for a short period), but it was his dinner at Babbo that sparked a new passion in him: "I ate a rib-eye steak, which is kind of decadent and maybe silly-sounding, but the whole thing was a transcendent fine-dining experience and my dining companion said, 'If you like it so much, why don't you work here?'" So the next morning, Fischer applied for a job there and was hired as a grill cook on the line. He worked there for nearly three years, then moved back home to the Vineyard and split his time between the Island and California, working as a private chef for various notable clients, including Keith McNally. And somewhere in there, he made his way both to Rome, where he took part in Alice Water's Sustainable Food Project, and London, where he worked at both St. John Bread and Wine and The River Café. After his time abroad, Fischer headed back home to run his family's Beetlebung Farm on Martha's Vineyard.

2 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Farm

"The farm's name, Beetlebung, more or less refers to the tree from which the Island's early settlers harvested wood for storing whale oil casks. The tool they used, a kind of mallet, was called a "beetle," and the "bung" was the stopper used to cork the casks. I spent a lot of time on the farm growing up because my mother was working here, but took over running operations from my aunt, Marie, when she retired in 2010 after 35 years. It's been an evolution of pretending to know how to do something until you actually know how to do it."

3 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Sign

"I'm always looking around for tossed-out items and so forth to see if I can make something from them. I found this piece of driftwood and a half-full can of this beautiful yellow paint in one of the tool sheds and just finger-painted the sign one day. There's always something to be made from what's already around."

4 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Knife

"This was my grandfather's skinning knife. The shape of it allows you not to poke a hole through the hide you're skinning and I'm guessing he used it for sheep or deer. He did a lot of butchering of animals, just as I do, and had a lot of old knives kicking around in his tool shed. But that one specifically was in the soil in his garden and I rototilled over it. It just popped up out of the soil and was this old, rusty-looking handmade knife. I polished it and sharpened it up, but it's made out of carbon-steel, so it rusts very quickly. But it was his and he's really the one who started all of this, so it's very special to be able to carry something of his with me."

5 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Rooster

"My maternal grandfather made a large metal rooster and spray-painted it orange and used it as the sign for his house — to find his house, we'd follow these orange roosters. After he died, my brother and I inherited his shop-full of trinkets and statues and stained glass, and I found this and really liked the design so I put it up on the greenhouse door and started pressing it onto T-shirts. It's become our unofficial logo."

6 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Greenhouse

"I hosted a little dinner here for friends and everyone working on the farm a couple of years back. We had this goat on our farm that was impossible to handle and was driving everyone on the farm crazy and everyone had been working incredibly hard, so I decided to thank them in a couple of ways… by roasting the goat and serving it for dinner. Friends took pictures and then little by little people started wanting to come by for dinners. Everything sort of took off from there."

7 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Book

"I'd never really thought about the whole process of designing a menu before stumbling upon this book, Menu Design In America, in a D.C. shop a few years ago. I found it so interesting to reference all these different menu styles and ways of wording things and to see how all of it has changed over the years. I always assumed that if you just had good food, then people would order your dishes. But I see now, especially having this restaurant, that there is a whole way of enticing people. I guess it's called 'put lobster on anything.'"

8 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Collaborator

"My girlfriend, Emma, also grew up on the Island, just one town away. She and I met a couple of years ago, and she works on the farm now and does letterpress. She's dedicated to very simple, lovely things and I love the simplicity of her creativity. It's confident and beautiful. And textural. It's fun when we design menus together: She grows the food, we harvest it together and come up with a concept for the food, and then she prints the menu and I have no idea what it's going to look like. And then it blows me away every time."

9 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Spear

"I go down and stay with friends in Georgia every now and then. I wanted to go boar hunting with them, but I don't have a firearm permit and I can't bring a gun. I decided to take a bow and arrow one time, but it turns out I'm really bad with a bow and arrow, so this past year I thought, 'What's as quiet or quieter than a bow and arrow?' So I did some research on spear hunting. I also like the idea of food harvesting being physical and primitive and based on physical attributes, where you have to be part of the hunt, like hunting used to be. My friend is a metal worker so he designed the spear and I built the handle and shipped it down to Georgia. We didn't come close to any boar last time, but one day!"

10 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Bag

"My friend Jake [Gyllenhaal] got this Dunhill bag in a gift bag from the BAFTAs, and like a lot of nice gifts I've gotten from friends, I took it and messed it up and it looks even better than it did to begin with. It was a nice bag when it started, but now it's beautiful."

11 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Boots

"These Le Chameau boots are super functional and so nicely made. I have a real appreciation for those well-designed, maybe more expensive things that last for 20 years. I was lucky enough to receive these as a gift, but when I can, I prefer to buy that one great thing and have it forever instead of buying something cheap year after year. They're deerskin lined and waterproof, so in the spring and fall when it's cold and wet and dreary and your feet are miserable, they're perfect. Plus they look nice and apparently are what Orson Welles wore. Kind of an added bonus."

12 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Family Visitors

"Most people have family photos in their office; I have my actual family in my office every day, whether it's my dad coming by to check-in or getting a visit from my nephew, Tristan (pictured). The whole thing — the farm, the restaurant — is very much family-oriented, and it's nice because it cuts out a lot of the difficult workplace dynamics. It can be complicated because it's a big family, but it's mainly incredibly helpful."

13 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Gallery

"Because everything is family-made and homemade at the farm, it just made sense that my aunt, Marie Scott would sell her paintings there as well. They're beautiful scenes from the Vineyard and Vermont, where she also spends her time. And just outside is where we sell flowers and there's a sign painted by my mother, Jeannie, who was a watercolor artist. She passed away a few years ago, so it's very meaningful to me to have that sign, which was done in her handwriting."

14 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Dining Room

"When I took over at The Beach Plum in April, I wanted to make the space feel like home. It's a beautiful place and was formatted well, but it needed to feel warmer and more lived-in. We had a really tight budget and about two weeks to renovate it, so I ripped off the ceiling and bought one big lot of wood from my friend, Bob Daniels, and built the restaurant interior and tables with it. We scuffed everything up and took a blowtorch to chairs and such, aging it all so it feels more like our home now."

15 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Art

"Michael Van Valkenburgh is a friend and one of my heroes. He is an amazing person and is such a gifted landscape architect and is so driven. He has been an incredible influence, and he offered me these paintings for the restaurant. I have no idea how, but he somehow finds the time in his unbelievable life to paint."

16 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Right Hand

"Danielle Pattavina and I met just this past spring. She'd been working with some friends of mine at restaurants in Brooklyn and Manhattan (Diner, Back Forty, Savoy), and she came out here to help launch Beach Plum. She and I communicate and challenge each other to do a better job and treat people better and treat our staff better and just be better every single day. She works incredibly hard, which I have so much respect for, and I could not get this all done without her."

17 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Community

"I got into farming partly because I came back from NYC broke and I realized that it only made sense to start using what I was growing. Seeds are cheaper than actual produce; and I also knew that I would get better products if I grew them or bought directly from farmers. I started to realize I could spend money to support my friends' growing and my own growing habits, if only on a small scale. Now that we're a farm and we've grown and we like the support of our community, I look at the whole picture: Everybody is doing local food and farm-to-table, but our restaurant is really an extension of our community in the sense that through farming and through living here and my appreciation for all these products and food, our relationships with these vendors are much more than just ordering from them. It's much more than just buying carrots from a farm because we think that's what we're supposed to do. It's having direct relationships with all these producers in order to support them and help them to make a life for themselves that they want, which is in food production. The more money you give directly to farmers, the more they can grow the best food. It benefits everyone."

Top right: Todd Christy of Chilmark Coffee, which the Obamas drank at dinner last night. Bottom left: North Tabor Farm, the source of the Obamas' greens. Bottom right: Chris with Al Gale of Menemsha Mussel Co., which provided the mussels for Michelle's dinner.

18 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Ingredients

"The secret to all of this, in so many ways, is just straight, perfect food that's selected at the right time. Everything we serve here is from local farms (save the pigs, which come from Vermont). And then how we cook and eat at the restaurant — it's healthful. It makes you feel good. You feel better after you've eaten it. That's so important to me: Keeping it simple and honest and doing this right with the right ingredients."

19 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Sous-Chef

"Lee Desrosiers, formerly of Marlow & Sons, and I cooked together in Brooklyn and just hit it off. We sit down together every morning and plan the menu. And every night I rely on him to produce some really fantastic dishes, which can be tough when you have to improvise last-minute because we've run out of something. It happens because we use the freshest ingredients, which are not always in endless supply. So he helps me figure it all out."

20 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The Vintage Farmer

"I found this photograph at a thrift shop in Los Angeles off Ventura Blvd. I was looking through old postcards and found it and thought it was the perfect photograph — his outfit, the composition... I was just drawn to it as a piece of art. It was simple and there was no information on it, like it was homemade. And the look on his face: He's proud of what he does but also really tired. Like me."

21 of 21

Elizabeth Griffin

The After-Hours Activity

"The one thing I knew back when I started at Babbo was that I wanted to work hard. I like working hard; my grandfather taught me about the value of it. He was with me in the field, teaching me about growing and farming almost up until the day he died, so it has always been important to me. And yes, I get exhausted — the whole crew does — waking up on most days before the sun comes up. But I get to make something I care about so much and spend time with people I greatly respect. That has always been what this whole thing was about."

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.